Opinion

Why I got sick of pimping out fat pills and selling deodorant

In this guest post, young Australian creative Rebecca Campbell talks about why she moved from working on campaigns for fat pills, to painting round the globe

I’ve been a creative for less than five years. But after jobs as a copywriter in a couple of big agencies I found myself sick of telling women that they would feel more confident if their underarms were softer and pimping out fat pills to people who didn’t need them.  

Rebecca Campbell, MumbrellaSo, fuelled with one or 10 ciders from the night before I barged into my boss’s office mid-recession in London and quit.

Seven weeks later I found myself painting my way round the world for paint brand Dulux’s Let’s Colour Project – an initiative to colour the world with paint – and writing a blog for them about the experience.

Rather than telling consumers that colour has the power to transform their lives, Dulux decided to put its product to the test.

From a school in London to a local square in India, from a council estate with more than 80 per cent unemployment on the outskirts of Paris to a row of homes in Rio de Janeiro. We rolled up our sleeves with local communities from all over the world and splashed around over 120 different colours – literally. For me, it’s been a perfect example of how advertising can be both truthful and transparent.

The brand established a clear tone of voice and an emotional territory, the rest moved on from there. Now we have events happening all over the world, every day we get 50+ tweets and proposals from local people wanting to add colour to their city. We’re also active on YouTube and Flickr.

Gone are the days of selling strawberry-flavoured cornflakes without showing the fruit, the colour red, or the word strawberry.

We need to “truth up” because these days it’s the consumers who are in charge. They own the brands, and they’ll call us on anything we spin. Now, more than ever, it’s time for brands to put an emotional stake in the ground and then hand over the concept to consumers to co-create. Because these days, the work is as much theirs as it is ours. And, as far as I’m concerned, this is great news for creatives.

The worst part of our job is the constant over complication of a beautifully simple idea. But now, if a brand wants to be truly social there is no time to over-think and over-review. When you have a blog or are developing content it’s crucial that everything is instantaneous.

Gone are the creative reviews, internal reviews, client reviews and first, second and seventieth amends. As long as a brand has a crystal clear tone of voice, a good product (yes, there’s that too) and is willing to be honest, creating content and concepts is easy.

One of the first things we learn as creatives is to find the “product truth” and now because consumers are holding us to it, brands have to start living up to it. Forget telling consumers what you stand for. It’s time to actually stand for it.


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